Category: bliefs

Rentertainment

Le Grande Mermaid has recently expanded her musical repertoire to songs outside of Disney and Sing-A-Long. She has proven to have an outstanding capacity for recall, repetition, and pop-culture.
Recently over breakfast we were riffing acapella on one of her latest from the pop artist, Pink. I got the first solo:

I’m not here for your entertainment. I don’t wanna…

Daddy?! [interrupting] No it’s not that! It’s
‘I’m not here for your RENTertainment’

Oh. Sorry, I didn’t…
[leaning over to Mommy and whispering into her ear]
He is so crazy, he is ALWAYS getting the words wrong.

She has plenty of evidence for her conclusion including (but not limited to) her own genetics.

Everything eats

A couple of days ago The Mermaids were grinding ice again. It isn’t the point of this story to go into detail on that little quandry but suffice it to say that whenever Le Grande Mermaid runs the fridge-ice-grinding-thing The Wee Mermaid nearly keels over in laughter. It must be an inside joke.

At any rate, these shenanigans were in full swing and The Mermaids were having a ball. The Queen Mother suggested to Le Grande Mermaid that she water the plants with all of that ground up ice rather than pouring it directly into the sink. That sounded fun, and so she agreed and a cup full of ice was deposited in the nearest plant post haste.

Well, The Wee Mermaids mood immediately turned to concern!

Uh oh! Iyth Outie!
No, it’s okay sweetie. Leave the ice innie. The plants eat it.

So, this new oddity was cause for cogitation and The Wee Mermaid stared at the ice, slowly melting in the potted plant. Suddenly, her course of action decided, she turned on her heel and wordlessly retrieved her noontime snack from the table, returned to the scene of the melt, and deposited a cup of dried cranberries in the pot with the ice declaring,

Eath! Eath!

Total Lunar Eclipse

Tonight was a total lunar eclipse here in the northern hemisphere. We started out with clouds but then the sky opened up just in time for the start of totality.
I snapped a ton of blurry pics with my little canon elph and out of those I got some decent shots and a couple of good ones even through my binoculars. These are the best ones.

Lunar Eclipse Far with Renton in the foreground This one is approximately a 2.5 second time exposure. Slightly overexposed the moon but you can just make out the two neighboring bodies. Maybe BopOp or Jerry can identify them? I sharpened this image a little bit.

Lunar Eclipse Far with neighboring objects This is a camera zoom (3X). I screened this one over at 50% to make the stars (bodies? I think the bottom one might be Saturn) pop a little more. You can clearly see the darker side of the shadow on the left side of the moon. This is full totality.

Lunar Eclipse near through binoculars This image is taken through my binoculars, full totality, with full camera zoom. I had my binoculars set on the deck railing, propped on my cell phone. My little 3.2MP Canon was attached to my Joby Gorillapod tripod which was in turn latched onto BopOps tripod leg at just the right height to point it through the binoculars. I think there is some chromatic aberration going on here (the red halo along the bottom of the moon) either from the binocs, the camera, or both. Also note, the moon looks oblong but I checked it for round in my graphics editor and it is an optical illusion. In fact, lets see if I can’t clean that up a bit.

Lunar Eclipse near through binoculars, cleaned aberration full black Aha! I simply erased the chromatic aberration from the edge and re-filled the background with all-black (no noise). Not too shabby for a 3.2MP hack-job, through smudgy binoculars, and a nice editing tool.

—
Update: Two testimonials, one visual and the other via Skymap, confirm the “body” to the lower left was indeed Saturn. Blief-it-or-not.

It’s Valentines Day you know

Last night, Abby excitedly showed me every valentine she had gotten from classmates. After poring over slips of paper from Sami and Ryan and Molly et al I was eating dinner and Abby was enjoying a lollipop. As I ate she approached and stared at me intently. Perhaps she was gauging my jaw as it furiously worked on the cornbread muffin? After a short stare, her statement.

[removing the lollipop deftly…thuch!]

Tomorrow is Valentines Day you know.
[I nodded]
[thuch!…replacing lollipop]

She walked away satisfied.

Oh future in-laws and otherwise close friends of my daughter, may you have a good system for recording dates or an outstanding memory.

Alternatively, as I do, you can let Abby remind you.

My left shoulder

Well not broken I confess, but it sure hurts like it.

I separated my shoulder (low grade) in a soccer game 10 days ago. As goalie, I met with a six-foot-four striker, in full stride, whilst saving a weak goal attempt. Since I was firmly planted, with a 5 inch head start on the race to a lower center of gravity, I pancaked him. He got up relatively quickly, I mostly got his soft bits (maybe a diaphragm or two), while I escaped standing up with a slightly lower shoulder.

The good news: it is only pain. There isn’t likely to be any long term damage and in fact, I can even continue to use it without further medical attention or risk…of anything…other than the excruciating, stabbing, excoriation of the nerves on the distal end of my clavicle.

So, I ah, I got that goin’ for me

The snowy side of the street

Here is a snap of the snow as it fell at our house this past Monday morning. The interesting thing about this shot is that it seems to reveal a selective nature to the snow itself, i.e., it has only fallen on the South side of our street. You can see the bushes and driveway on my side are bare and dry while the entire driveway and even part of the street across the way are covered in a soft blanket of white.
Snowy Side of the street
Anyone care to explain this one?

I know BopOp and Grumpy can’t resist the urge.

An LED Light

I hadn’t even got it all the way out of the packaging and when I pulled on the clear-tubey end of this nice, rechargeable, wireless, LED light that my brother gave me for christmas…it came apart in my clutches.
But man, that packaging was aggressive. That stuff is ALWAYS hard to get open. They should have made this clear-tubey thing out of the packaging, then I wouldn’t be posting this.

You may even notice the yellow wire hanging out whereupon previously it didn’t really.

Clear Tubey Thing

Good news in all of this; my years of breaking things has instilled a tolerable ability to put things back together again. And in many cases they are reassembled in a manner consistent with my usage of them. That is, I put them back together to withstand me. This time was no different. I soldered that little yellow wire back on with about 5 grams of solder. I put that at about 4.5 grams more than necessary. This overage was rather in deference to my weak soldering skills as opposed to my ‘make it bigger, better, stronger’ approach. I would’a been happy with 3.5 grams but eh.

Anyway, after that I packed all the entrails back in, smeared 1/4 tube of super glue all around that clear-tubey thing and ran it down till it stopped…then a bit more for good measure.

It worked! In retrospect, I shoulda tried to test the light before I rammed all that super glue up it’s wahTubey but, again, eh. I have proceeded to use that super-tubey LED light no less than 6 times in the past 5 days. It is very chic.

The great balloon caper

I finally uploaded all of my images from the holidays and found a pretty nice one of BopOp’s balloon.

BopOp's balloon, ALOFT

I also posted, on YouTube, my one good video of the event. You can hear me half-laughing (and Emma too) as I bend over backwards and she nearly falls off my shoulders. She didn’t, of course, primarily because she got her hooks into every crevice of my face and unhinged my right contact in the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhCMR9IUIRI

Good thing I have learned…they are disposables.